FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Ministers of Education have been alarmed in the past to discover Australian High School Students know very little about the history of this country. The following essay by Ashlee M, Year 8, Coolathanu High is believed to be included in some bureaucratic report somewhere.

Australia is a large incontinent that lies in the Specific Ocean except for Tasmania which doesn’t know where it is. Australia is very hot because the Topic of Popracorn is in Queensland somewhere, which means Queenslanders are sweaty and can grow topical plants in their ears. But the most important topic is the topic of Cancer because if youse get sunburnt, Omigod, ya gonna die.

It is 100 years since the end of WW1. That seems like a long time ago. When I explain that my grandfather’s elder brother Michael O’Donnell was killed in that war at Bullecourt, France in 1917, the story loses the dust of history and sounds closer to us.

This is the story about a young man who was Court Martialed 3 times, held with enemy prisoners and finally allowed to go to war following a Senate Inquiry.

It is also a story about duty, loyalty and honour and how much we Aussies have changed today.

The sound that distinguishes Anzac Day from others is the bugle call. The solitary call of the Last Post reverberates down the generations as a mournful cry for the loss of war.

In the First World War it was the loss of so many young lives and for what? A toehold on some peninsula, a futile charge into no man’s land? The loss swept into every Australian household. Mothers lost their sons.

Young women lost brothers, boyfriends, lovers, husbands. And for fathers, adding to the pain of loss, was the bitter aftertaste of guilt summarised so succinctly by Rudyard Kipling, who lost his own son in that war:

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“If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

Yet the generation of Australians who served in the First World War had qualities we no longer possess and this is our loss.

My daughter found a video marked ‘Kerry. Don’t tape over’ in my mother’s handwriting at the back of a cupboard last week. Sadly, my mother has been dead for over 20 years. We don’t have a VCR player anymore. My daughter bought one for $20 on Gumtree.

The tape contained TV interviews. Kerry with Ray Martin. Kerry with Steve Vizard. etc. I was astounded to see my younger SELF of 30 years ago. I was in my thirties. (The pic above is 10 years old). All I can remember was hating going on TV. I was SELF CRITICAL of everything. My looks. What I said. What I didn’t say.

Keep in mind this was live TV. You are often told what to wear, what to say, what not to say. And there was the audience too. I wanted to please them all, the anonymous THEY. But don’t we all do that all too often. Shouldn’t we ask ourselves sometimes ‘who exactly am I trying to please here?’

And why? Why did I care about THEM? Why didn’t I just please myself? See for yourself: